Number of Koreans aboard 1945 sunken Japanese ship likely to be unveiled by year-end

A photo of the Ukishima Maru vessel [YONHAP]

 
The number of Koreans aboard a Japanese ship that sank in 1945, killing up to over 3,000 people, will likely be revealed by the year-end following an analysis of passenger lists, the interior ministry said Sunday.
 
The government has commissioned the Foundation for Victims of Forced Mobilization by Imperial Japan to conduct an in-depth analysis of 75 passenger lists and related materials received from the Japanese Foreign Ministry between September last year and March this year.
 
 
The analysis is expected to be completed by mid-December after the Interior Ministry sorts through passengers listed more than once and corrects misprints and mistranslations. Currently, 18,300 people are listed in the documents.
 
The Ukishima Maru was transporting Koreans, many of whom were forcibly mobilized for wartime labor, back to their homeland in August 1945, days after Korea’s liberation from Japan’s 1910-45 colonial rule, when it sank off Japan’s Aomori Prefecture following an explosion in the hull.
 
Japan announced that the ship had hit an underwater mine, and 524 out of 3,700 passengers were killed in what it called an accident. But the bereaved family members of the Korean victims claim more than 3,000 lost their lives, out of as many as 8,000 people aboard, and have charged that Japan intentionally blew up the ship.
 
Even with the upcoming analysis results, the families may refuse to accept them, given that they are based primarily on data provided by the Japanese government.
 
“We have to wait and see the analysis results,” Han Yeong-ryong, head of an association of Ukishima victims’ family members, said. “We shouldn’t determine [the lists] based only on what Japan gives us. We have to use this opportunity to completely determine the truth.”
 

A photo of the Ukishima Maru vessel provided by the Korean film company Mayplus [MAYPLUS]

 
The foundation analyzing the lists also expressed skepticism that Japan will reveal the exact number of passengers on the ship.
 
“We have to obtain additional material from Japan or carry out a full-scale survey of victims’ family members to prove the numbers,” a foundation official told Yonhap News Agency.
 
Last year, Korea’s Foreign Ministry received a portion of the passenger list for the Ukishima Maru, the first time any part of the list has been handed over to Korea after over a decade of negotiations between the two countries.
 
In 2016, a Japanese government record was released, revealing that explosives had been loaded on the ship. Kim Mun-gil — then adviser to the Association of Korean Victims of Ukishima Sinking — obtained the document from a Japanese national and first released it at a seminar in Busan on Aug. 8 of the same year. Following this, criticism grew over Japan’s accountability for the disastrous deaths of the survivors. 

BY YOON SO-YEON, YONHAP [[email protected]]